Pedal and Path: Across the Continent Awheel and Afoot

by George B. Thayer

PERILS OF CAÑON COASTING.—(Page 174.)

Clark Foss, the celebrated driver, who owned this route, and was one of the twenty-five different men in different places who drove Horace Greeley on the ride when he promised “to get him there in time” (every one who ever came to California has heard the story; it is the worst chestnut ever perpetrated, but they still retail it), died about a year ago, and his son, Charlie Foss, now drives the six-horse open wagon. For three or four miles I was in constant dread of meeting the stage coming up, and had I done so on some of those oxbow shaped curves in the road, where there is not a foot of space on either side of the hubs, between a ledge of rocks and a precipice, the result can well be imagined. The stage suddenly appeared around one of these very curves, when but a few seconds before, I had been thrown off upon my feet by a rock in the road and was walking, but although I was told I should hear the stage coming, I did not till the leaders’ heads appeared around the ledge of rocks, not ten feet ahead of me. But for striking the rock in the road, I should surely have been coasting, and the result would have been, in all probability, I should have gone over the edge, or the horses and stage would have done so. Then what a volley of questions was fired at me by the dozen passengers aboard. The driver stopped, and for five minutes it seemed as if everyone in the stage was talking and asking questions, all at the same time. Some of the passengers had seen me before and knew of the trip, and as the stage disappeared around the curve with the gentlemen waving their hats and the ladies their handkerchiefs, and all wishing me good luck, the pleasant impression left with me will long be remembered, not only for the good feeling shown towards me, but because our meeting on that sharp curve at one of the most dangerous points of this dangerous mountain road might have terminated so differently and perhaps disastrously.

Only once did I come near having any trouble with the wheel. In crossing the numerous dry creeks that run down the steep sides of the mountain, the road makes horse-shoe curves, descending rapidly down to the creek and then rising as sharply on the other side. In coasting down into these curved gullies, one has to get his feet back upon the pedals pretty lively in order to climb up the grade on the other side without dismounting, but once the wheel slowed up quicker than I expected, and before my feet were back on the pedals, the wheel turned straight across the road and rolled slowly to the edge of the precipice. I took one look down, my heart leaped into my mouth, and I sprang out of that saddle backwards quicker than I ever did before in my life. It was undecided for a few seconds whether the machine would go over the edge with or without me, but after balancing there for a year and a half, as I remember it, I got the best of gravity and finished the ride down to the geysers in safety.

The distance from Napa, fifty-five miles, could easily have been made in a day, had I had a good meal in the middle of the day to work on; but as it was, I saw all there was to see in an hour, and after resting another hour was ready to start on before noon.

Those who have visited the geysers lately, and also saw them a dozen or fifteen years ago, tell me the springs are not nearly as active now as they were then. I certainly was disappointed. It is surely a queer place up that narrow little cañon, with the different colored rocks—red, green, blue, yellow, and white ones—all crumbling down in one confused mass into the little stream of scalding hot water that runs down through the cañon. The sides of the cañon were sizzling and bubbling over with little hot springs, and the steam that escapes from the holes was sickening. It smelled like eggs that have passed their prime. Once I poked some of the crumbling stuff down into one of these little vent holes, and the creeping steam spitefully blew the hot sand-stones in my face and eyes. I pushed a stone a little larger than my fist into the most noisy hole, but the escaping steam barely moved it. Years ago, they tell me, a rock as large as a man could lift, would be thrown out of this hole with considerable force. The witches’ caldron, a boiling pool of lead-colored water, not now over five or six feet in diameter, is the most active of any of the springs, but there is nothing that can be called a spouting geyser in the whole cañon.

The ride down to Cloverdale, seventeen miles, was greatly enjoyed, for the grade was just steep enough to coast, but not to make dangerous riding, and there certainly was something very novel about gliding safely along in the wheel track close to a ledge of rocks, with a yawning precipice within a foot of the other wheel track, and the road winding around projecting points of rocks, and in and out along the side of the mountain, and yet with a grade so gentle that the wheel kept on quietly without the use of a brake. The mountains were so bare of trees that the fine views were unobstructed, and one could look down the winding valley and see points in the road that he would eventually reach in that quiet, easy manner, always without the use of any power either to accelerate or retard the speed of the wheel. Yes, a trip to the geysers on a bicycle is well worth taking, but it is the riding and sight-seeing on the way that pays, and not the geysers. With a barrel of water, a few barrels of lime, and a little coloring matter, one could almost discount the geysers in their present activity.

The ride down the Sonoma valley, and to the point where wheelmen are obliged to take the train and ferry over to San Francisco, was through a level country and over excellent roads, and an average speed of six miles an hour was maintained throughout nearly the whole of the ninety miles of the return trip. California is over twenty-five times as large as Connecticut, and I have only seen a small portion of it, but to say, as most Californians insist, that what I have seen is a beautiful country, is certainly drawing upon the imagination to a great extent. The roads are dry and terribly dusty, the grass is dead, the streams all dried up, and the only green objects to be seen, as you look across the country, are the trees and grape-vines and occasionally a few acres of shriveled-up corn. And these are covered so thickly with dust that the color underneath is hardly discernible. To one accustomed to the refreshing showers of the Eastern States during the summer, which render the verdure so luxuriant, the dry, dead, dusty appearance of almost everything from the tops of the mountain peaks to the rocky bottoms of the dry creeks and rivers, is anything but beautiful. It looks as if the face of nature needed washing. But let one imagine the hills and mountains covered with rich, green grass and bright-colored wild flowers, as they were only a few months ago, and think of the streams and rivers brimming full, or imagine the hundreds of acres of grape-vines I have seen, loaded down with their dark, rich fruit, and he can easily see that California has been and will soon be again, a most beautiful country through which to travel. We see California at its worst in August.

“Do the fleas trouble you any? We are eaten up alive with them,” said an Eastern lady to me one day. My experience in Colorado with mosquitoes was sufficient, it seems, for the fleas here have troubled me very little, but they are a source of great discomfort to most travelers, and even the old residents. Persons going out for a walk will sometimes come back covered with them. The pleasure of an evening’s entertainment or social call is often sadly interfered with by the presence of a flea in a lady’s underclothing, and a clergyman here was once seen to suddenly leave the pulpit during service and rush for his study, and afterwards explained to some one that he had to go out and “hunt a flea,” but that was not the one that “no man pursueth.” It is said that some California genius has invented a flea-trap, but I hear of no well-authenticated instance in which the flea was captured.

Distance traveled on the wheel, 3,200 miles.